The Congressional Experience

An Institution Transformed

David E Price

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000329223
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Congressman David Price is uniquely qualified to guide readers through the labyrinth of rules, roles, and representatives that is Congress. As a trained political scientist, he connects the practical politics on the Hill with the theories of the discipline. He is equally focused on the ethics of public service at a time when politics seem to have reached a new low. Through it all, he conveys a clear sense of the challenges, disappointments, elations, and deep concerns implicit in serving as a member of Congress--especially at a time of national and international fragility.

New to the 4th Edition

• Covers elections and presidencies since the third edition including serving with Obama and Trump.

• Details the Trump impeachment process and the subsequent pandemic bringing change to Congressional floor voting processes, putting current crises in context with prior occasions during the Clinton and George W. Bush presidencies.

• Looks at the reform agenda and the prospects for national political renewal.

1 Introduction

On November 4, 1986, I was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from the Fourth District of North Carolina, a five-county area that included the cities of Raleigh, Chapel Hill, and Asheboro. Many thoughts crowded in on me during election night, but one of the most vivid was of a spring evening in 1959 when I had first set foot in the part of North Carolina I was now to represent. At the time, I was a student at Mars Hill, a junior college in the North Carolina mountains a few miles from my home in Erwin, a small town in East Tennessee. I had taken an eight-hour bus ride from Mars Hill to Chapel Hill to be interviewed for a Morehead Scholarship, a generous award that subsequently made it possible for me to attend the University of North Carolina (UNC). I was awed by the university and nervous about the interview. Thinking back on some of the answers I gave (“Would you say Cecil Rhodes was an imperialist?” “I believe so.”), I still marvel that I won the scholarship. But I did, and the next two years were among the most exciting and formative of my life.

I went north in 1961 to divinity school and eventually graduate school and a faculty appointment in political science, all at Yale University. But the idea of returning to the Raleigh–Durham–Chapel Hill area of North Carolina continued to tug at me, particularly as I decided on a teaching career and thought about where I would like to put down personal and academic roots. Fortunately, my wife, Lisa, also found the idea agreeable, despite her budding political career as a member of the New Haven Board of Aldermen. Therefore, when I received an offer to join the political science faculty at Duke University and help launch what is now the Terry Sanford School of Public Policy, I jumped at the opportunity. In mid-1973, we moved with our children (three-year-old Karen and one-year-old Michael) to Chapel Hill. Though we were delighted with the community and the job and saw the move as a long-term one, I would have been incredulous at the suggestion that within fourteen years I would represent the district in Congress.

The Fourth District has been redrawn six times since I was first elected, after the three decennial censuses and three additional times ordered by the courts. As I will elaborate in Chapter 3, North Carolina has become a poster child for partisan gerrymandering. In the last decade, this has given my district some bizarre configurations but has also made it more solidly Democratic—designed not for my benefit, but in order to make the surrounding districts more Republican. The district has included as many as seven and as few as three counties; overall, I have at some time represented all or part of twelve counties, a large swath of central North Carolina.

North Carolina, and our part of the state especially, have grown and diversified greatly over these three decades. The state’s congressional delegation has grown from eleven to a projected fourteen after the 2020 census. The five-county area I first represented now contains enough people to populate almost three congressional districts.

The Fourth District has always centered on the cities of Raleigh, Cary, Durham, and Chapel Hill in some combination and has included all or parts of Research Triangle Park, a monument to synergy among high-tech large and small businesses, research universities, and the state and federal governments. Rapid growth has produced widespread suburbanization and, more recently, extensive downtown renewal, although small-town and rural areas remain. African Americans have comprised between 20–32 percent of the drawn and redrawn district, and increasing numbers of people with Chinese, Indian, Middle Eastern, and other ethnic backgrounds have been drawn to the area. The Latino population is approaching 11–12 percent and has increased at least tenfold over my time in office.

Politically, my present district is 48 percent Democratic by voter registration, 24 percent Republican, and 28 percent “unaffiliated.” Hillary Clinton received 68 percent of the district’s vote for president in 2016. During my early years in office, as Chapter 2 will amply demonstrate, the Fourth was a “swing” district, a partisan battleground in national, state, and many local elections. The addition of Durham County to the district in 1997 increased its Democratic tilt, but this was largely offset when the more Democratic parts of Raleigh and Wake County were transferred to neighboring districts. Republican control of the General Assembly after the 2010 census brought extreme gerrymandering and the “packing” of the Fourth District with many more African Americans and Democrats.

Several of the district’s counties were represented in the distant past by Nathaniel Macon (1791–1815), North Carolina’s only Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. The district sent two Chatham County populists, William F. Stroud and John W. Atwater, to the House during that movement’s ascendancy in North Carolina in the 1890s, but again elected a Democrat in the White supremacy campaign of 1900. For the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, the eastern part of the present Fourth District was represented by two men: Edward W. Pou (1901–1934), who chaired the House Rules Committee, and Harold D. Cooley (1934–1967), flamboyant chairman of the House Agriculture Committee. Carl Durham, who represented the district’s western counties from 1939 until 1961, chaired the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy.¹ Such extended periods of service, with attendant seniority in the House, became less common in our part of North Carolina after the departure of Durham and Cooley. Heightened partisan competition produced more frequent turnovers in congressional seats. Members also became less intent on House careers, sometimes resigning to seek other political offices. And the drawing and redrawing of district lines following the Supreme Court’s redistricting decisions destabilized traditional electoral coalitions and rendered elections less predictable. When I was sworn in on January 6, 1987, I became the Fourth District’s third representative in as many terms. Now, it is hard for me to comprehend that I am on track to match Pou’s and Cooley’s terms of service!

By the time I ran for Congress, I had amassed a good deal of political experience. Senator E. L. (“Bob”) Bartlett (D-Alaska) hired me as a summer intern in 1963, and I returned to his staff as a legislative aide for the four succeeding summers, eventually doing interviews out of his office for a doctoral dissertation on the Senate. After moving back to North Carolina, I worked actively in local politics, managed a couple of congressional districts (including the Fourth) in Jimmy Carter’s 1976 presidential campaign, and took leaves from Duke in 1980 and 1984 to serve as executive director and then chairman of the North Carolina Democratic Party. But these were diversions, albeit increasingly serious ones, from a primary career in teaching and research. By 1986, I had studied, taught, and written about Congress, among other subjects, for twenty years.

Among some voters—and occasionally among congressional colleagues—my academic background has been a barrier to be overcome. But not for most. My district has one of the highest numbers of Ph.Ds. per capita of any comparable area in the country. Representing an area that boasts multiple institutions of higher education, the Research Triangle Park, and retirement communities populated by people with distinguished careers, I have remarkably literate constituents. I sometimes reflect ambivalently on this as I contemplate the volume of well-reasoned correspondence on every conceivable issue that comes into my office! Yet the electoral advantages are considerable. During my first campaign, we polled to test public reactions to my academic affiliation and background, expecting to downplay them in the campaign. Instead, we found highly positive associations and ended up running a television ad that featured me in the classroom!

The growth of the Research Triangle area has brought economic and political strains along with increased prosperity and diversity, and the benefits have not been equally enjoyed. The district’s median household income is around $70,000, some 34 percent above the median income statewide. But around 12 percent of our residents live below the federal poverty level of $26,200 for a family of four. Downtown and inner-suburban redevelopment has produced gentrification and displacement of lower-income residents, creating pressures to preserve housing diversity and promote transportation alternatives.

It was, I suppose, in light of my dual background as an academic and a political practitioner that I was asked to contribute reflections on my first term in office to the 1989 edition of Congress Reconsidered.² I was reluctant at first, pressed for time and uncertain of the value of the exercise, but I was challenged by the idea of giving an account of congressional operations that would combine personal experience with the sort of generalization and analysis characteristic of political science. My story and the stories of other people and events would be told not mainly for their own sake but as a way of showing how the U.S. Congress works. The article that I produced formed the core of the first edition of this book, which extended through the midpoint of my third term (1991–1992). The second edition took the story forward to the 106th Congress (1999–2000), the third edition to the 108th (2003–2004), and the current edition to the 116th (2019–2020), with many years and monumental changes to cover, adding up to a substantial transformation of the institution. The chapters to follow will address getting elected (and unelected and then reelected); adjusting to life in Congress, finding a niche and later assuming leadership in the House; varieties of policy entrepreneurship; the evolving politics of appropriations, the budget, and foreign affairs; party operations and the effects of increasing polarization; and communicating with and serving the district.

Topics that were familiar to me as an academic—the place of religion in politics, the ethics of public service, the critique of Congress as an institution, and political reform—have taken on particular interest during my years in office, and in later chapters I will offer some reflections on them. These are areas where ideas are often used as weaponry more than as a means to enlightenment, and I will try to nudge these discussions in a more productive direction.

The period covered in this volume was a contentious and challenging time for Congress and the country, never more than at present. It extends from the waning of Ronald Reagan’s presidency to the advent of Donald Trump. It was a time of momentous change in world politics, spanning the end of the Cold War and the collapse of communism in Russia and Eastern Europe; allied interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo; two U.S.-led wars against Iraq, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the subsequent offensive against al Qaeda and international terrorism; successful diplomatic efforts to prevent Iran’s development of nuclear capacity, followed by Donald Trump’s deliberate blowing up of that agreement; and the further disruption under Trump of American alliances and diplomacy. At home, it was at first a period of tepid economic performance and a deepening recession (1990–1991), followed by a decade-long economic boom, an economic downturn that culminated in the great recession of 2007–2008, and a slow and steady, if somewhat uneven, economic recovery unexpectedly derailed by a global pandemic. Intertwined with these trends as both cause and effect were federal budget deficits of $250 billion “as far as the eye could see” giving way in the mid-1990s to modest budget surpluses but then, after 2001, abruptly returning to red ink and mounting debt. The comprehensive budget deals which had facilitated the fiscal turnaround of the 1990s became ever more elusive in the face of partisan polarization. This reduced the country’s readiness for the economic impact of the coronavirus, which nonetheless had to be countered with massive rescue and recovery expenditures.

It was also a period of political turbulence, with neither party clearly dominant, in North Carolina or the nation, and citizens expressing considerable dissatisfaction with politics and politicians. Democrats controlled the House, Senate, and White House for two unstable periods (1993–1994 and 2009–2010), as did the Republicans after the 2002 and 2016 elections. But the norm during these years was divided party control. Republican presidents faced Democratic control of one or both houses of Congress through the 1980s to 1992 and after the 2006 and 2018 elections; Democratic presidents faced opposition control after wave elections in 1995–2000 and 2011–2016. During the sixteen terms covered in this volume, I served under seven House Speakers—Democrats Jim Wright, Tom Foley, and Nancy Pelosi, and Republicans Newt Gingrich, Dennis Hastert, John Boehner, and Paul Ryan. Wright and Gingrich resigned amid ethics charges and Boehner was driven from office by dissidents from his own party during a period that also spanned President Reagan’s Iran–Contra scandal and the impeachment of two presidents.

The reputation of Congress, never Americans’ favorite political institution, reached historic lows during these years, and House members often found it politically profitable to run for Congress by denigrating and running against the institution. Gingrich and his self-styled Republican revolutionaries came to power in 1994 largely on the strength of a harsh institutional critique. They in turn became the targets of public cynicism and distrust as their revolution overreached and began to falter. “Congress bashing” has continued unabated, often crowding out more reasoned and relevant judgments about individual and institutional performance. My hope in this book is to encourage and facilitate more useful assessments by conveying a sense of how Congress works and beginning to raise some of the right evaluative questions.

But first things first. Recalling the dictum of former House Speaker Tip O’Neill that “all politics is local”³ (except when it isn’t, I might add, in light of 1994 and subsequent wave elections), I will begin with an account of how I came to run for Congress and managed, with the help of a great many people, to get elected.

Notes

1 See David E. Price, “Roll Call: A Congressman Looks Back at Those Who Went Before,” Raleigh News and Observer, July 30, 1989, p. 1D.

2 David E. Price, “The House of Representatives: A Report from the Field,” in Lawrence C. Dodd and Bruce I. Oppenheimer, eds., Congress Reconsidered, 4th ed. (Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly Press, 1989), chap. 17.

3 Thomas P. O’Neill, Man of the House (New York: Random House, 1987), chap. 1. “You can be the most important congressman in the country, but you had better not forget the people back home. I wish I had a dime for every politician I’ve known who had to learn that lesson the hard way. I’ve seen so many good people come to Washington, where they get so worked up over important national issues that they lose the connection to their own constituents. Before they know it, some new guy comes along and sends them packing” (p. 26).

2 Campaigning for Congress

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has an elaborate student government and a tradition of lively campus politics. The years I was there, 1959–1961, were particularly active because of the civil rights movement. The sit-ins that began at a Greensboro lunch counter in February 1960 rapidly spread across the state, and many students became involved in efforts to desegregate restaurants, theaters, and other public accommodations. The movement awakened my political consciousness and channeled my campus involvement. I was president of the Baptist Student Union at a time when campus religious groups were among the most active proponents of change, and my main achievement as a member of the student legislature was the narrow passage of a resolution urging Chapel Hill merchants to desegregate their businesses.

I knew a number of campus politicians who were reasonably certain that they would someday be governor, senator, or at the very least a member of Congress. I did not regard such expectations as realistic for myself and had other career interests I wanted to pursue. But those years were politically formative in a number of respects. I began to realize that, by conviction, I was a Democrat, despite an East Tennessee background that predisposed me in the opposite direction. I came to admire political leaders like Adlai Stevenson, John F. Kennedy, and North Carolina’s young governor, Terry Sanford. Most of the new ideas and responses to social problems seemed to be coming from...